Lightning. It is a huge topic. I wanted to touch on it after my last post Lip Balm, Hand Lotion, and Rubber Gloves because, as a fiction writer there is so much to explore here. There are so many kinds of lightning that people can’t even agree on which kinds are real.

Is lighting just a giant static spark caused by friction and an imbalance of charged ions? The jury is still out. A big part of that is due to the numerous kinds of lightning. Heat lightning, dry lightning, cloud to cloud, cloud to ground, and many more.

Upper-atmospheric lightning is some of the most fascinating of all. With descriptive terms like blue jets, sprites, and elves, how could they not be? These phenomena have only really come into view in the last twenty years and are poorly understood. Perchance in history humans have briefly glimpsed them and mistook them for other things?

Interesting things? According to National Geographic, you can be struck by lightning ten miles away from the storm, an individual bolt can be five miles long, and the odds of being struck by lightning in your lifetime is 1 in 3,000. A bit better than the lottery…

The surface temperature of the sun? Around 5,800° Kelvin. The air around lightning? About 30,000°Kelvin.

Lightning has been shown to produce both x-rays and gamma rays. The gamma rays, by the way, indicate that it may be actually producing antimatter.